I love these--and Deborah's way with myth here (the Odyssean business traveller, the wonderful Dido song...) But one of the niftiest things about Deborah's work to me is the way there is often a line or rhyme or lack of rhyme that subverts the form. You could read Elizabeth's Dress and think that it was written in cross-rhymed quatrains, but it isn't--there is, wonderfully, no rhyme for "ankles". Take also the penultimate stanza of the business traveller poem, where we go for a moment from cross-rhyme to envelope rhyme, so that room and home are suddenly kept at arm's length. It's like a magician showing you how the trick works, over and over again, and yet still pulling off the illusion right before your eyes.
[This message has been edited by A. E. Stallings (edited November 20, 2008).]
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